Bible lost on World War II battlefield now back with soldier's family

Saturday

Joe Bob Sparks told his family back in Texas that he was on a battlefield somewhere in Europe when he found the Army-issued, pocket-sized New Testament with another man’s name inside it.

He brought it back with him after World War II ended, and kept it for decades, near a collection of memorabilia at home in Fort Worth.

Sparks, who became a high school football coach, died in 2003.

A few years later, his nephew, Patrick Ickes of Jacksonville, was visiting his Aunt Charlene when he picked up the little Bible and saw the handwritten name inside — Johnie J. Duncan.

There was a date: Sunday Nov, 19, 1944. An address too — Westminster RFD 3, South Carolina — and next of kin: Mrs. J.M. Duncan.

Ickes, a Navy veteran, was intrigued. Who was Johnie J. Duncan? What had become of him?

"I’m a Christian and I love Bibles, I really love old Bibles," he said. "I asked my aunt about it and she said, ‘Oh, your Uncle Joe found it on a battlefield in World War II.’ She might have said France, but I’m not sure."

She let him take it home and Ickes went on the internet and made some attempts to figure out who Duncan was. He says he kept reaching dead ends and websites that wanted money for information, so the search didn’t go anywhere.

He didn’t want to let it go though, so he turned to his sister, Mary Budrejko, who lives in Reston, Va.

She does Facebook. Ickes, 68, doesn’t.

In a few minutes she found a Duncan in Westminster, S.C., and sent him a message. It turned out that this Duncan wasn’t the right one. But Westminster, in the upper-left corner of the state, is a small town, and he figured he knew which Duncan she was looking for.

He did. And this month, Danny Duncan held in his hands the New Testament the Army gave his father when he was 22 years old and a long way from home.

Johnie Duncan was raised on a farm, and stayed in the Army 26 years, retiring as a first sergeant. It was a better living, he figured, than anything else he could have done.

He didn’t tell his children much about the war.

But they knew that a grenade had blown off half his ear, and that Army doctors sewed it back on. As an old man, his neck hurt him all the time: The doctor told him it was arthritis, not the 50 pieces of shrapnel, maybe more, lodged in there.

He did say that he’d been in France and Germany, and that he’d seen Patton a few times. Other than that, not much. He could be a serious man.

He mellowed, though, as he got older, and Danny Duncan, who is 62, got to know his father pretty well toward the end, before he died at 79.

They found a routine: Danny bought a bass boat and they’d go out together once a week. And they’d talk.

"I remember him telling me one time before he died, while we were fishing: ‘Don’t ever treat anybody who doesn’t have money or material things any different from the way you would anyone else. They’re some of the best people around.’ "

On that boat, the war did come up, briefly, his son said. "He did tell me once, ‘When you smell the smell of death every day, and you see no relief from it’ — well, that’s got to be pretty traumatic to an individual."

His son said his father kept his religion to himself. "He read the Bible through several times and he did his own type of worship. He was a very humane person, always did the right thing as far as I know of."

Neither Danny Duncan or his sister Barbara Adams recall their father mentioning his missing Bible.

But it still means a lot to them, Duncan says. And it touches him that some strangers would take the time and trouble to get back to them the Bible the Army gave their father 73 years ago.

There are still good people in this world, he said.

Danny Duncan now keeps his father’s pocket-sized New Testament with him, on the passenger seat of his Toyota Tacoma.

"I carry it with me. It does make me feel closer to him. I can only imagine, when I first held it in my hands, I wondered, what has this Bible seen? It was six years before he married my mother. He was 22 years old. I know he was scared to death."

Then there’s this: His father, he said, left a message in the Bible, on the last page, a blank page that bore his familiar handwriting.

"Nothing fancy. But he said, ‘Let us pray for peace.’ "

Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082

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